August 08, 2006

If you're on the fence about whether to buy the book... can't do much better than this review. I don't know the person who wrote it, but it's awfully flattering.

Unrelated links... There's a blog post on Seth Godin's blog about why we need bosses, which resonated with me. I may post more about this later. And a cool article about the Tigers over at Baseball Prospectus (most of the stuff one there is subscriber-only but this one isn't).

August 05, 2006

On the face of it, this didn't sound great. Writer follows four meals from where they began -- the farms, the animals, the trees -- to his plate, to investigate our nation's food industry. I think I marked "not interested" when it came up on my Amazon recommendations. But then I read a good review in the Times, and, unprompted, one of my friends said this was one of the best books he'd ever read, and I trust his opinion about this stuff so I decided to check it out.

It's terrific.

Michael Pollan is a great writer, and makes 400 pages of this stuff fly by pretty quickly. It's a scary book on the order of Fast Food Nation. If you read Fast Food Nation, there's a section in here that will sound familiar -- McDonalds is evil, Chicken McNuggets have hardly any chicken, animals in slaughterhouses are treated badly. But this book looks deeper, and it looks broader. It starts off with a long discussion of corn, and how everything we eat comes from corn, in a very unnatural way -- high fructose corn syrup, corn-fed beef (which is unnatural for the cows), chicken raised on corn, corn starch, industrial glazes and flavors and packaging made of corn, etc. We are a society of corn. Not something I'd read about before. Interesting. There's also a long section about Polyface Farms, an organic farm in Virginia that tries to do things right, and how that contrasts with how so many farms do it wrong. Lots of rich detail, lots of great writing. Whole Foods and others are making organic turn into the stuff we'd like to think organic isn't -- industrial farms, poor conditions. A whole section on mushroom hunting that I thought I'd end up skimming but I didn't. There's four or five distinct New Yorker-length pieces in here that are all terrific and taken together make for a really great read, if you care about where your food comes from. I can't recommend it more highly.

August 02, 2006

Princeton has a great set of alumni discussion groups that get lots of postings and have lots of members. I posted something about the book last week on the princeton-writing group and princeton-lawyers group and have gotten some nice e-mails. So I decided to check the Harvard groups and see if it made sense to post there. I'm a member of their writers-and-publishers group but it never really has any activity so I wasn't sure if it was just an anomaly and there are lots of good groups there, or that for whatever reason Princeton alumni groups are really robust and Harvard's aren't. So I went to the Harvard page. Apparently people can start groups for any reason, and so it's an idiosyncratic list, with, for example, a Cleveland networking group, but none for Chicago. Most of the groups have hardly any members and have had hardly any messages posted. The biggest is the Career Networking group, with 1204 members and 360 messages posted, which really isn't that many messages posted, if you think about it. Besides a couple of active class year alumni groups, there are only 4 groups with more than a hundred messages posted, and one of them is "Vacation Rentals." I found the list of groups pretty funny. I wanted to share some highlights.

9/11 Truth: This community is for serious discussion of the myriad inconsistencies,
and unexplained and ignored evidence of high-level administration
complicity in the events of 9-11-01, focusing primarily on the growing
body of evidence suggesting that the collapse of the three buildings
(WTC 1, 2, and 7) can only be explained by way of controlled
demolition, a fact diametrically opposed to the current official version of the events. 4 members. 1 posting.

Crimson Parents: A forum to discuss any and all issues related to conceiving and rearing children. 4 members. 0 postings.

Harvard Fellows: A discussion group for new or old Harvard Fellows and Visiting Fellows in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. 1 member. 0 postings.

Harvard Museology: Our aim is to cultivate an inspired group of museologists and those
interested in any aspects of museums. 'Museology' will serve as a forum
to discuss any aspect of news, studies, and reviews concerning
museums... across the globe. 10 members. 1 posting.

Harvard People with ADD: This group is intended for Harvard students and graduates of any school
who have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. 1 member. 0 postings.

Harvard People with ADHD: This group is intended for Harvard alums of any school who have been
diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder or Attention Deficit
Hyperactivity Disorder. 1 member. 0 postings. (same guy?????)

Stay-At-Home Parents: A
forum for stay-at-home parents to exchange advice about re-entering the
workforce, and ideas for staying intellectually challenged while at
home raising children. 1 member. 0 postings.

Harvard Boston Singles Over 50: Social networking group of Harvard single/divorced/widowed men and women over 50. 30 members. 10 postings.

Single in Boston > 48: Men and women in the greater Boston area over 48 who would like to enrich their lives by meeting other singles. 6 members. 0 postings.

YouTube has the pilot episode of Aaron Sorkin's new show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Just watched it. Has a similar feel to The West Wing. I like it. I'll watch. Didn't blow me away, but I like it.

I'm playing around with some ideas for another Wall Street Journal Online piece, and one of my ideas is to write something about lies that law firm associates tell themselves. Just trying to be light and amusing, nothing terribly consequential, but stuff like "When I'm an associate, I'll totally have time to go on summer lunches every day," or "You can't live on less than $145,000 a year in New York," or, well, I don't know. Not sure this will end up being a great topic for a piece, but I'd love any ideas anyone has for more of these kinds of things, e-mail or comments are fine.

August 01, 2006

Send In The Idiots shouldn't have been as compelling to read as it was. Kamran Nazeer, diagnosed with autism as a child, follows up with 4 of his former classmates with autism, not having seen them in years, spends a few days with each of them, and writes about their lives. But really that's just the vehicle for Nazeer's first-person perspective on what it's like to be autistic and cope with the world. The book plays in the world of high-functioning autism -- Nazeer works in the British government, one of his classmates ended up a speechwriter for U.S. senators -- which is what makes it interesting, I think. He's able to be very insightful about his own struggles. I found the book to be terrific. Having read this one, and Paul Collins's "Not Even Wrong" (Collins blurbs the back of Nazeer's, which is what made me pick it up, since Collins is an awesome writer and all of his stuff is brilliant), and enjoyed them both... I don't know what it is that makes me interested in reading about autism in a way I'm not interested in, say, reading about bipolar disorder. I don't know, I just find it compelling. This book would make a great documentary, if he'd filmed his visits. Like, an award-winning, brilliant documentary. Good book. Check it out.

The Long Tail is about the idea that with online retailers, and goods that don't require shelf space -- bookstores without inventory (Amazon), music files, etc -- there's a lot of money to be made on the tail end of the popularity distribution. I think the stat he gives is that 98% of all tracks on iTunes sell at least one copy (I don't have the book in front of me to verify that's the example he uses, but if it's not iTunes it's Rhapsody or Amazon or something else like that). And even if it's only one copy, one times 5 million is a lot. Something like a quarter of Amazon sales come from books outside the top 100,000 that would be carried in even the biggest superstore. Technology is making "hits" less important and people are able to discover their own niches, and there's a lot more products people are able to find and love and spread by word of mouth. This is all sensible and fairly straightforward. That's sort of the problem. It's all sensible and fairly straightforward and once you read the introduction, you get it. There's one graph shape that repeats throughout the book. The long tail. Got it. It's not a *bad* book at all, it's just repetitive and unnecessary. It's an article, blown out. I read it sitting in Borders. I liked it. But it didn't take me long.

Feeding The Monster is a book I've been looking forward to for a while. Seth Mnookin's last book was about the New York Times and the Jayson Blair scandal, and it was great. For this one, he spent a year with full access to the Red Sox front office, and writes about how they went from "cursed" to winning the World Series to Theo Epstein leaving and then coming back. Can't get enough of that Theo Epstein stuff, sadly, as my blog posts from this winter illustrate. I feel bad for Jed Hoyer, one of the Red Sox front office guys. His biggest mention in the book is about how when they were signing Schilling, he had a stomach virus and vomited all over Epstein's hotel room. Hoyer was one of the co-GMs of the Sox while Epstein was gone. Okay, this book is great because it gets you behind the scenes into a setting you don't get to read about with this much detail and insight, ever. If you have fantasies of being a GM, you have to read it. Mnookin is great at this stuff. I'd read anything he writes next, because he's just so good at capturing detail and bringing you into someone's world. Terrific book, I'm thrilled it made the NYT bestseller list last week, and I hope it continues to sell well. He's got a cool blog too.

Side note, about the Red Sox. Careful readers of my book may notice that there's a point where Anonymous Lawyer receives e-mails from people at fictional firms. For two of the firm names, I used the names of Red Sox front office personnel. Just for fun, and probably since I was obsessively following the Theo Epstein stuff at the time I was writing. No one -- NO ONE -- has e-mailed me about this yet. When I mentioned Sons Of Sam Horn (a Red Sox fan message board) on the AL blog, I got three e-mails. But memorialized in print? No one notices. What I was really hoping was that the mention would make someone pass the book along to someone over there. Oh well. Read Mnookin's book, it's awesome.